cap which he wore, with its faded gold band, brought home, as is so well known, by his faithful attendants, Chuma and Susi; swords and knives too, used by him in Africa; a spear, thrown at him in his last journey, that very nearly put an end to his life; a photograph of a facsimile of the hut where he died; a piece of the bark in which his body was wrapt, and of the cord with which the box containing it was fastened. The external memorials of both the great men are thus remarkably similar, and, so far as such memorials go, both have got fair play at Newstead. And yet, when we think of the two men, it is a great contrast that is brought to our mind. Few lives could have been more unlike each other than the lives of these two men. At first, no doubt, both had to bear the same struggle with poverty and hard lines, and to Byron's mother the struggle was undoubtedly more trying than to the parents of Livingstone. To be reduced from wealth to poverty by the selfishness and injustice of an adventurer, who, instead of bringing to her the affection and protection of a husband, came with the greed and rapacity of a wolf, was undoubtedly a grievous trial, only too likely to excite one to impatience and bitterness. It would have needed a very gracious influence to counteract the tendency of such treatment to sour the heart and fret the temper, and to that Mrs. Byron seems to have been a stranger. The impatient and fretting example of the mother, with whatever of other hereditary influence may have come from her, and without any of that great corrective which Divine grace supplies, made her son liable to fits of the same unhappy temper. In the case of Livingstone's parents we find the gracious influence in full operation, that enabled them to bear their burdens patiently, and to look habitually on the bright side of things. Their example of self-control was not lost on Livingstone, and when the Divine power came to work directly in his heart, it only made his temper more patient and his outlook more bright. Never had man more need of patience, and never had patience more of her perfect work. It ought to be remembered too that Livingstone's youth was spent at a time when political impatience filled the air. He grew up breathing the atmosphere of the Chartist agitation, and no doubt sympathizing with it in some things. But whatever views of public policy this may have led him to form, it had no effect on him personally in making him impatient or diminishing his self-control. The world does not yet know more than a fraction of the trials of Livingstone's patience. What a contrast he was to Byron in the spirit of calm enduring, as well as in the ability, under all kinds of discouragement, to look on the bright side of things! One might moralise a little here on the responsibility of mothers. Old Mrs. Livingstone and Mrs. Byron had each put into their hands one of nature's finest gems: the calm Christian temper of the one preserved hers for a life of almost unqualified nobility: the uncontrolled temper of the other made hers little better than a splendid wreck. In the whole aspect of their lives, too, Livingstone and Byron are a contrast. The steady influence of a simple Christian faith, an unselfish love, and a pure devotion to the interests of others made Livingstone's life a wonderful sermon-the grandest sermon, probably, that has been preached in modern times. In the main, Byron's life was the opposite. And yet we would do justice to the poet. He did not want noble impulses and generous feelings. His friends spoke warmly of his affectionateness. And his consecration of himself to the cause of Greece was the crowning act that in some degree redeemed the selfishness of his life. But in the main his life was a selfish one, and he knew it well. His spurts of misanthropy were only too real, at least at the time, though they did not express all that was in his heart. His epitaph on his dog Boatswain shows how soon he acquired and how ingeniously he nursed the contemptuous temper which found so many an outlet during his life: "O man! thou feeble tenant of an hour, Who knows thee well must quit thee with disgust, Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat, Thy smiles hypocrisy, thy words deceit ! By nature vile, ennobl d but by na.ne, Each kindred brute might bid thee blush for shame, How different and how truly Christian the spirit of Livingstone, cherishing so true a regard for even Caffres, Bushmen, and Hottentots, as creatures made in God's image and capable of recovering it, appreciating their friendship so cordially, and returning it with such ample interest! Ever breathing out such large loving thoughts for Africa and all its tribes, and looking with such longing heart for the time when its woes should cease, and the great lesson of Christ's love should make its people live together in unity and kindness! Byron used to say that his heart had turned old ere he had ceased to be a boy. Moore, in his biography, comments on his premature scepticism, making the remark-to this age so strange that scepticism is not natural to the young; that a trustful faith and a bright hope for the future are congenial to the youthful heart. Byron early abandoned his Christian faith, and began to scoff at creeds and sects, plunged into sensuality, and lost all the hope and joyousness of youth. With Livingstone it was quite otherwise. He was young almost to the last. He never lost the simplicity, the hopefulness, the transparency of a child. His children recall the ferny glades in these Newstead woods, where he would play at hide and seek, enjoying the fun as much as they. And this childlike spirit was the soul of his religion. God was his father, and he was God's child. His prayers were the simple, loving utterances of a trustful heart; and the silver lining in his clouds, and the bright visions of the future which he never ceased to cherish, were the fruits of his intuitive convic ion that GOD REIGNED, and that, in His good time and way, all things would work together for good. Both In the deaths of the two men there was a certain similarity. died among strangers, and these the people whom they ought to benefit. Byron lacked not the means of comfort, yet his biographer tells us that there was such confusion and discord in his chamber that it was most painful to think of it. We certainly do not profess to follow the poet behind the veil. He passed into the presence of One who is the Sole Judge, and who alone is able to judge. But we look with a far brighter feeling into that poor hut at Ilala where Livingstone's spirit was gathered to its home. In the attitude of prayer his soul breathes away, and we hear a voice saying, "Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord; yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours, and their works do follow them." W. G. BLAIKIE, in Sunday Magazine. PARLIAMENTARY GOVERNMENT IN AMERICA. It must be accounted one of the notable facts in the history of the Anglo-Saxon race, and likewise in the annals of representative institutions, that the Government of the United States, formed originally for the needs and exigencies of three millions of people, inhabiting a narrow strip of seaboard, has remained without any material change for nearly a century, and is found to work as well for a nation now fifteen times as numerous, occupying a territory fifty times greater. Indeed, it may truthfully be said to work with less friction and more general satisfaction now than then. Its infancy was imbroiled with controversies, respecting the interpretation of the Constitution, so fierce that the Union was more than once in real danger before it had come of age. Some of the States had to be dragged into the Federal compact, and others were threatening to go out long before the institution of slavery became a rock of offence between North and South. The task of statesmanship during the first quarter of a century was not so much to make it work well as to make it work at all. At the present time nobody looks upon a separation of the States as possible, and none desire it except a few straggling adherents of the Lost Cause, whose voice is as ineffectual and unheeded in the general movement as that of the irate Tory at the creation of the world who demanded that chaos be preserved. How far this contentedness with existing institutions is to be as cribed to material prosperity, how far to the excellence of the institutions themselves, and how far to the inherited Conservatism of the race, it would be futile to inquire. The country has advanced in wealth with great rapidity, notwithstanding temporary checks, during the whole period of the national existence; and few people desire to change their condition when they are well off. Apart from this, the Americans are at heart, and perhaps without knowing it themselves, among the most conservative peoples in the world. Although nobody is readier than the Yankee to devise and adopt new modes of doing things, and while the earth does not contain a more ubiquitous traveller or daring speculator, nobody offers a more angry resistance to anything in the nature of organic change. The wicked persecution of the Abolitionists during a quarter of a century was part and parcel of the national tendency to cling to whatever is, for not one in twenty of the Northern people who participated in it, and voted with the slaveholders, had any pecuniary interest in slavery direct or indirect. The uprising in behalf of the Union was a conservative rather than an anti-slavery uprising. President Lincoln uttered the voice of the majority of the nation when he said that if he could save the Union by freeing all the slaves, he would do that, and if he could save it by freeing none, he would do that, and if he could save it by freeing some and not freeing others, he would do that. Catholic emancipation was carried in England half a century ago. It was not carried in the State of New Hampshire until a few years since, if indeed it has been fully effected even yet. The laws of Rhode Island regulating the Right of Suffrage were, until a recent period, as fantastic as those of England before the Reform Bill, and the States of Vermont and Connecticut are full of rotten boroughs to this dayeach town electing one member of the legislature without regard to population. It may be said that national vanity is accountable for this fixedness of attachment to national institutions. It is immaterial what name it is called by. The conservatism of one country is most commonly vanity in the eyes of another. The English fondness for titles and a State Church is a preposterous vanity to Americans, and the rock-ribbed Conservatism of China is vanity to all the world else. It makes no difference what name is given to the set of ideas which cause a people to cling tenaciously to their own fashions. It remains a fact that the Americans are an exremely conservative people, while not desiring to be considered so. To the great majority of Americans it is a matter of no consequence whence they derived their institutions-in what ancient quarry their forefathers digged. The popular Fourth of July conception is that they were invented, made out of whole cloth, struck out at a heat; that they sprang into existence Minerva-like without gestation or heredity. It needs no professor of evolution to tell us that this kind of birth for a government as for an individual is impossible. Historically the American form of government is the British government of the last century with hereditary succession left out. I am speaking now of the form of government, and not of the machinery by which it is kept going; of the legislative, executive, and judici 1 processes, not of the distribution of the suffrage or the sources of power. The form of King, Lords, and Commons was adopted not only for the Federal Government, but for each of the thirteen original States, and has been copied in regular succession by twenty-five additional States-King, Lords, and Commons without hereditary succession, and of limited tenure. The Since the adoption of this form of government, far greater changes of substance have taken place in England than in America. powers vested in the President, Senate, and House of Representatives, and in each of them, are no whit less now than they were under George Washington. Those of the Crown and the Lords are vastly less than they were under George III. So attenuated have these become that it is a matter of dispute whether they have any direct powers left that can be successfully asserted against the Commons. Indirect powers they have, undoubtedly, of considerable magnitude and import, the greatest being the influence exercised by the Lords upon the elections of the Commons. This, however, is the influence of landownership rather than of lordship. The House of Lords a short time since rejected the Irish Volunteer Bill after its passage by the Commons. Possibly they may reject it a second time, for it will surely come up again. But after its third passage by the Commons the Lords will pass it also, not because they will like it any better than before, but because they must. And so it would be with any other bill about which the Commons should show any decided purpose and determination. The Senate of the United States would reject any bill from the House which the majority of its members did not like-would reject it thirty times as easily as once. On the other hand, the House, finding its measure rejected once, would not pass it a second time until changes in the personnel of the Senate should give indications of a change in its temper. The difference between the executive modes of the two countries is still more marked. Any measure which passes the Commons is supposed to have received the royal sanction in advance at the hands of her Majesty's Ministers, or failing that at the hands of her Majesty's Opposition, who straightway become Ministers. Hence the subsequent approval of the bill is a matter of form and a matter of course. But the President of the United States would veto a bill without hesitation as many times and under as many different forms and guises as Congress should pass it-as President Hayes did during the recent session of Congress; and in so doing he would be sustained by public opinion as exercising a lawful discretion. The country might think the discretion erroneously exercised, but the right to exercise it |